Chocolate Cupcakes

The one we’d all been waiting for! Chocolate cupcakes with three different recommended buttercream frostings to choose from. This was the third recipe in line for our cookthrough of Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen , and the girls chose to make the buttercream coffee-flavored.

By now, we’ve gotten the buttercream technique nailed, and again the results were super silky and really fabulous. Clara discovered the bit that made the difference: even though we have a very nice hand mixer with a good balloon whisk attachment (and we tried it with both the balloon and the regular whisk attachments), this really needs to be done in the stand mixer.

The paragraph that described the cupcakes in the recipe book said, “ . . . their soft, moist texture [is] from a simple hand-mixing method”. Well, we used the simple hand mixing method, but these puppies were dry and much more like a brownie than a cupcake. The batter didn’t even halfway fill the 12 cupcake cups. Kind of a disappointment, although they all disappeared quickly as usual!
Once again we have Araminta’s distinctive style:




I tried decorating a couple this week, grating a bit of bitter chocolate on top:



And Lucinda hit hers with a tsunami of girliness as usual: